Free The Jew is Not My Enemy by Tarek Fatah Page B

being the only former associate of Hitler who escaped and was never tried as a war criminal. While prominent Nazis were hunted down and tried, Hajj al-Husayni, with 50,000 marks in his pocket from the German Foreign Office, was allowed to escape, first to France – where he was put up in the Villa Les Roses in the Parisian suburb of Louveciennes with a chauffeur, two bodyguards, and his secretary – and then to Egypt, where he was granted asylum. Unwilling to risk offending the large Muslim population in Egypt, and to avoid any problems in Palestine, which was still under British mandate, Britain looked the other way as the mufti ended up in Cairo.
    Yugoslavia, where the mufti had organized the Muslim SS division responsible for the murder of thousands of Marshal Tito’s partisans, demanded that Hajj al-Husayni be tried for war crimes. Britain, reeling after the surprise defeat of Churchill two months after he won the war, was now governed by Clement Atlee’s Labour Party. The last thing Atlee’s government wanted was unrest in the colonies. Britain wanted out of both Palestine and India, and in both places, partition was in the air and Muslims were restless. Not wanting to offend the Muslims – assuming wrongly that they were at the beck and call of a pro-Hitler mufti – London made a feeble request to France, asking them to hand over al-Husayni. The French balked, and the British simply dropped the matter.
    Behind the scenes, al-Husayni was pulling the strings of his Egyptian connection, the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, there existed a reservoir of sympathy for the Nazis. Men like Anwar Sadat, who would become president, and many other Egyptian army officers had openly expressed sympathy, and some had worked for the Germans as spies. In this climate, the Brotherhood, with its pro-Nazi leanings, took up the cause of Hajj al-Husayni. They sent a telegram to the British ambassador in Cairo asking him to ensure the well-being of the mufti, referring to him as the sole representative of Palestine. Simultaneously, the Brotherhood sent telegrams and delegations to the French ambassador to convey their thanks to Paris.
    With both London and Paris unwilling to bring the mufti before a war crimes tribunal, Yugoslavia approached the United States to apply pressure. When America asked Paris to hand over Hajj al-Husayni, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood sent a protest memorandum to the Americans that read: “We, in the name of the Muslim Brothers and all Arabs and Muslims, would like to warn your government not to continue this unjust Zionist policy.… We would also like you to confirm to your government our preparedness to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of rescuing our brethren, wherever necessary.” 3
    This posturing by the Muslim Brotherhood actually worked. Soon, the year-old Arab League, not wanting to be seen as abandoning an Arab leader, also added its name to the call to save the Grand Mufti from prosecution. In June 1946, al-Husayni managed to quietly slip out of France and into Egypt, where King Farouk readily granted him asylum. Britain once more half-heartedly asked Cairo to extradite the mufti, but the Egyptians knew this was more of a formality than an order. Like the French, they too shrugged off the British, whose strength as an empire had been sapped beyond recognition.
    Today, when European governments kowtow to Islamo-fascists, fearing a backlash, one is reminded of the lack of will to prosecute the Grand Mufti of Palestine in 1945.
    In Egypt, where he was treated as a hero, Hajj al-Husayni expressed no regret for his role in the deaths of thousands of Yugoslav partisans. This was not the first time the Arab Street has cheered a mass murderer. When the Egyptian government criticized those who had backed Hitler, including al-Husayni, his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood came to his defence. They declared that the mufti had committed no wrong by aligning himself with the Nazis. In fact, they claimed, Hajj